I can’t remember how much I knew of Elvish languages before The Silmarillion, with a glossary, appeared in 1978. Can you tell from the text of The Lord of the Rings (not counting the Appendices) that Quenya and Sindarin are related? Are any words explicitly given in both?
RSS feed for comments on this post.
In the Appendices (we weren’t going to mention the Appendices) the list of month names shows obvious parallels; but of course month names are often borrowed.
It would be hard to tell from the text alone that there are two Elvish languages. There is the dialogue about the names of a healing herb: kingsfoil, athelas, asea aranion, of which the last two are presumably Sindarin and Quenya respectively.
foil and las mean ‘leaf’.
aranion means ‘of kings’.
If athe and asea are cognates, they must mean something other than either ‘king’ or ‘leaf’.